Patch 4.0.6 and You

Joyous occasion, isn’t it? I know you’re all worried about how warriors have been the target for the flavor of the month QQ that’s been going on around the official forums so let’s dive right in, take a look at the upcoming changes and how they affect you as a front line protection warrior.

Thankfully, a lot of the warrior patch notes are centered around other the other talent trees, likely to try and address the dominance that warriors have enjoyed in PvP.

For general changes, the there are three big changes. First off, Cleave and Heroic strike damage has been reduced by 20%. While those abilities weren’t your main threat skills, it’s still gong to hurt your threat generation a bit compared to before so that might be something that you want to keep an eye out for.

Inner Rage is also getting a redesign from increasing all the damage you deal by a flat percentage to reducing the CD on Heroic Strike and Cleave. This one is actually a pretty serious hit to your threat. As a tank, rage was never really a problem, turning this ability into a flat damage/threat increase, however, with the change, it’s now going to be much less effective. It’ll be nice to have faster Heroic Strikes and Cleaves on demand when you need it, but it’ll be hard to compare to the previous iteration of this ability.

In the protection tree, the only change is something that shouldn’t really affect us at all while tanking and that is the fact that the Charge stun for those of us invested in the Warbringer talent (which should be all of us) will not suffer diminishing returns on our Charge stuns on other players in PvP.

In terms of warrior-centric changes, that’s about if. As you can tell, a lot of the changes that came through for warriors this round was designed around nerfing our PvP efficacy. As a result, the changes that we feel as protection warriors lies mostly in the threat and damage department. It’s been reduced a bit so you’ll have to be a little careful when it comes to gaining and keeping threat for a few days after this patch until you’re used to the new values but once you adjust, there shouldn’t really be any nerfs to our ability to survive.

In terms of other changes, a lot of the dungeons, both the normal and heroic versions, have been hit with a pretty significant nerf across the board. Running your daily heroic with a random group should be easier than it ever has been before as a lot of boss abilities have been fixed to take more time to cast, cast less often, or to just flat out do less damage.

The final changes to make not eof this round are the changes to the crafted epics and how they all have been granted an additional socket.

So just a free bonus to those of us who tried to get ahead of the game by dropping the gold on these.